Wealth Formula by Buck Joffrey

If you have been ignoring distributed ledger technology, you will regret it if you don’t start paying attention. I understand why people get suspicious of the space. The cryptocurrency ecosystem is full of scammers and hype. Talk of “lambos” and “mooning” can hardly be taken seriously by sophisticated investors. But amidst the din, lies technology that will fundamentally transform the world. I see the current crypto market as very similar to what happened in the 90s with the dawn of the internet and related technology companies. Yes…most of the dotcoms went out of business. There was ridiculous hype and valuations of companies that had no revenue-generating product and certainly didn’t even come close to making money. And when the dotcom crash came, the skeptics all said, “I told you so”. Indeed, they were right about the hysteria. But if they ignored the technology completely, they also missed out on early investments into companies that would eventually become the largest companies in the world. Recovering from the ashes of the dotcom debacle were companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple to name a few. The dotcom period of the 90s was, therefore, hardly a failure. Cryptocurrency skeptics look at the current technology craze the same way. However, just like in the dotcom era, there will be some big winners that come out of the frenzy and will become household names. Don’t you want a chance to be part of that?… to go back in time and invest in companies like Amazon and Google in their infancy? If so, you have to change your perspective on what’s happening now. Try to weed through the useless stuff like dogecoin and start looking at these projects like you would look at any other project in which you might invest. Learn, at a high level, what this whole distributed world is all about and why it’s such a big deal. Then learn about individual projects. Look at them like you would any other investment. Who are the developers? What is their mission? What do they aim to do and what have they already done? Cryptocurrency is not going away. Bitcoin is here to stay and will become a globally recognized commodity like gold someday.  And while most other projects will die, others will become the fabric of a new decentralized world. As an investor, opportunities like these to be part of the new evolving economy don’t happen very often and may never happen again in our lifetime. I recognize that and, while I have no idea who the winners and losers will be, I can tell you that Hedera (Hashgraph) is my personal pick for a company that will become a household name over the next few years. And, full disclaimer, its native token HBAR, is by far and away my biggest cryptocurrency bag. In this episode of Wealth Formula Podcast, you will learn why I’m so bullish on Hedera as I welcome back co-founder and CEO Mance Harmon to the show. Don’t miss it! Mance Harmon is an experienced technology executive and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of strategic leadership experience in multi-national corporations, government agencies, and high-tech startups, and is Co-founder and CEO of Hedera. His prior experience includes serving as the Head of Architecture and Labs at Ping Identity, Founder and CEO of two tech startups, the senior executive for product security at a $1.7B revenue organization, Program Manager for a very-large scale software program for the Missile Defense Agency, the Course Director for Cybersecurity at the US Air Force Academy, and research scientist in Machine Learning at Wright Laboratory. Mance received a MS in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts and a BS in Computer Science from Mississippi State University.

It’s time for our next series of “Ask Buck” episodes. These shows have become extremely popular over the years and, if you are new to the Wealth Formula community, are particularly useful to “catch up” on recurring themes in our world. Tune in now for the first “Ask Buck” episode of Q2!

I’m always fascinated by stories of entrepreneurs showing early signs of interest in the world of business as children. Warren Buffett was apparently inspired by a book he checked out from the Omaha library at the age of seven called: One Thousand Ways to Make $1000. He went on to pursue several childhood business ventures such as selling gum and Coca-Cola bottles and, of course, the rest is history. Stories like these attached to big-name entrepreneurs are fun to think about. And I certainly see some of my children’s friends with unusual enthusiasm for making money at a young age. I can’t wait to see what they do in the years ahead. However, my experience as an entrepreneur amongst entrepreneurs is that most of the time, the narrative doesn’t quite go that way for entrepreneurs. What I have noticed is that most entrepreneurs stumbled their way into the world of business and surprised everyone around them, including themselves. I identify as an entrepreneur who happens to be a doctor. If someone looked at my childhood trajectory, I don’t think they would guess that I would end up doing what I did. For one, I was a good student who fit well into the professional tract. The only question that someone might have had about me during high school or college is whether I would end up in law school, business school, or medical school like I actually did. The idea of entrepreneurship never crossed my mind. I was trying to figure out what kind of job that I wanted. It wasn’t until accidentally stumbling upon Robert Kiyosaki’s Cash Flow Quadrant that the idea of entrepreneurship ever crossed my mind. And boy did it…like a bolt of lightning. And while I don’t agree with everything Robert says, I do owe him a debt of gratitude that, apart from my parents who brought me into this world, I owe no one. Now once you are in the entrepreneurial mindset, you can see opportunities everywhere. Not surprisingly, therefore, most entrepreneurs do what I did. They learn a business from somewhere that they are working and have that moment of clarity when they think to themselves: “I don’t have to work for this guy. I’m doing all the work. I can make more money on my own” This, I guarantee you, is the number one on-ramp to entrepreneurship.  Now, the interesting thing is that the type of business an individual typically pursues is often dumb luck. Let me give you a couple of examples to illustrate my point. One of my buddies has a tile company that supplies a bunch of major retailers like home depot. He does pretty well for himself. He makes a half million dollars a year and lives comfortably in a great place to live. This is a big deal considering the fact that he came from nothing. His story? Well, you guessed it. He worked for a tile guy who gave him all the responsibility while he played golf. My friend learned the business and started his own shop. Now another guy I know had a similar story. Except in his case, his job involved energy arbitrage. The company he worked for bought energy from countries where costs were less and sold it to countries where it was more expensive. Of course, that brokering came with a nice little commission on the trade—meaning millions of dollars per transaction. Well, one day this guy looked at his coworker and said, “You know, we could do this by ourselves.”. And that’s how he ended an entrepreneur. However, lucky for him, his job gave him the inside knowledge to execute a business that was quite a bit more lucrative than tiles or medicine. He didn’t work harder than the rest of us and I don’t think he was any smarter. He was just in the right place at the right time with the right mindset.  When I think about these guys and myself, I can’t help but think how random fortunes can be. I also think to myself whether there is a way to systematize this seemingly arbitrary reality of fate so that we can better guide our children. Based on what I’ve seen, the advice I have for any young person looking to find their way or their jackpot is to get as much exposure to life as possible. College teaches you some things, but it might be best as a resource for the people you meet. College graduates should look at their first few jobs after school as paid education. Furthermore, they should be quick to find other employment once they learn the skills available at that position. Not everyone aspires to be filthy rich, but anyone who has an interest in entrepreneurship should make sure that the business that they are going to rip off and make their own be lucrative. After all, working hard has very little correlation with being rich. I have three little girls-the oldest is only 12. Given my own interest in entrepreneurship and investing, people often ask me what I’m doing to provide them a financial education. Sure, we talk about money once in a while. I explain taxes to them by taking away half their ice cream..that kind of thing. But I think the best thing I can do for them right now is to simply encourage them to learn as much about different things as possible.  After all, whether it’s solving a problem and turning into a business as most entrepreneurs do or finding the best investments, it all comes down to having exposure to as many possibilities as possible. Speaking of children, this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast will be a little bit different. In the spirit of trying to figure out how to educate our own children, I interview an 18 year old self-proclaimed entrepreneur and investor. If you have you have kids, make sure to tune in. It may give you some ideas of how to approach your own duty as a parent to guide your children’s financial literacy. Jack Rosenthal is a 18 year-old entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder of one of the largest teen-only investment organizations in the world with close to 100 members and over $115,000 in assets. He has been featured in several news and television programs. Shownotes: How Jack became an entrepreneur and investor How do parents get their kids interested in financial education? What kinds of online education does Jack use to educate himself? Jack’s personal investing philosophy. Books: Teen Investing and Teen Entrepreneurship

In case you didn’t notice, we are in the middle of a massive cryptocurrency bull market. We haven’t been here since 2017 and who knows how long it will last. For those of you with solid positions, enjoy the run but don’t get greedy! I certainly learned my share of lessons from the last cryptocurrency bull run. I could have come away from it with a lot more money than I did if I had done things differently. However, like anything in life, investing is about learning from your mistakes and trying not to repeat them. Let me give you an example of one of the lessons I learned.  In 2017 I invested in an initial coin (ICO) offering on a project that I liked. ICO’s were all the rage back then but have since been banned by the SEC in the United States. I invested $50,000 into that project. One day the guy who told me about the project in the first place shot me a text that read “you must be happy you bought into that ICO!” Indeed, when I looked up the price of the token, my $50,000 was worth $4 million! Now there are times to buy and hold, but this was not one of them. That kind of profit on a token that really represented an idea more than anything else was a sell for sure in my humble opinion. The problem was that I couldn’t sell. You see, first of all, the only platform where the token was trading was not open to Americans. My friend who texted me is Canadian so he didn’t have that problem. So, for several months, I watched handcuffed as the euphoria around the project drained out. By the time it was on a platform where I could theoretically trade it, it was worth $500K. That was still 10X so nothing to scoff at. But then I ran into another problem. There was virtually no liquidity on the platform where I could trade it. In other words, the token I had may have been theoretically worth something, but there weren’t any buyers. By the time the token was on sizable trading platforms available to Americans and had some liquidity, crypto winter was upon us. Soon, my $50K that was worth $4 million was worth only $20K. What a miserable story right? You’re right but I can’t say I ever let it bother me that much. This kind of stuff happens once in a while when you are an active investor or trader. The key is to learn something and don’t repeat the mistake again. For those of you who are holding on to significant profits in alternative coins right now, make sure you can sell them if you want to. You might even consider very slowly moving out of the token into something traded on Coinbase where everything is liquid.  Anyway, I thought I’d share that story with you for you to learn from my experience. Crypto is the wild west still, despite tons of added regulation. Have fun and try not to lose money. In frenzies like this, that is very easy to do. Speaking of frenzies, beware of charlatans in times like these. Just like last bull run, you are going to see a lot of unnecessary tokenization and random companies adding the word blockchain to what they do in order to create a buzz.  Here’s a case study: an iced tea company called Long Island Iced Tea. The company made beverages from 2015-2017. But suddenly, in December of 2017 at the peak of the crypto market, the company changed its name to Long Blockchain Corp. (LBCC). The company never really made its mark in anything related to blockchain and, in a press release stated, “there can be no assurance that the company will be successful in developing blockchain technology, or in profitably commercializing it, if developed.” In other words—they were just using the name to pump the stock price. And sure enough, the share price increased by 500 percent! The moral of the story is that in times like these, it is important as ever to ask questions. Yes, I do believe blockchain and, more broadly, distributed ledger technology is the biggest technology advance since the internet. But make sure when you hear people using crypto terminology actually have a real purpose for it other than marketing.  There certainly are some potential use cases. My guest on this week’s Wealth Formula Podcast, for example, wants to securitize real estate ownership via security tokens. Does it make sense to do so? Well, listen to this interview and decide for yourself! Jason Ricks, CCIM, is chief operating officer of Liberty Real Estate Fund, the world’s first net lease security token fund. He is a native Texan, real estate investment expert, and security token pioneer. Mr. Ricks is a principal with Concordia Equity Partners, LLC, and was vice president at AMLI Residential (Morgan Stanley), an $11 Billion+ private REIT; BH Properties and Tarantino Properties. He is also a published author and has been featured on real estate and investing podcasts. Shownotes: What would be the benefit of a single-tenant property within an investment portfolio? What are Net Leases Why would you choose to invest in a fund if you can just afford to go out and buy some triple net real estate? How the security token works libertyfund.io

What gives something value? Gold has been considered valuable since ancient civilization. It has been used as money, as a store of value, and as jewelry. Gold is also scarce and it is not easy to mine. But…at the end of the day, gold is valuable because of a social construct that says it is and that it will continue to be going forward. The longevity of gold’s claim to value certainly adds to its standing as a valuable asset. Gold bugs who disparage bitcoin often point to the relative newness of the asset and its lack of track record over time. However, if we are going to give so much inherent value to the variable of time, it might be reasonable to consider other assets that have been considered valuable for a long time. We have almost certainly been eating and drinking for longer than we have been hoarding precious metals. That’s why we value rare foods the way we do. The European white truffle is a good example.  They grow underground and need to be sniffed out by special dogs and pigs! They cannot be commercially cultivated. How much are people willing to pay for rare food? Well, in 2017, a two-pound specimen sold for $61,250. I love truffles but really? Anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter whether you or I would spend that kind of money on a mushroom. Someone will and that’s why European White truffles are so darn expensive. That brings us to something else that we know can get pretty pricey quickly—wine. I like wine but am certainly no connoisseur. I pretty much put wine in two categories—wine I like and wine I don’t like. I know a little bit more about bourbon. Of course, buying and selling fancy wine has been, for the most part, for the wealthy. However, as we have seen recently in assets such as art and rare cars, technology is allowing for the democratization of many of the investments that were simply too expensive for most to participate in. Vinovest is doing just that for investment quality wine. So whether you’re an investor or you just like drinking this stuff, you are going to want to tune in to my interview with Vinovest founder, Anthony Zhang, on this week’s Wealth Formula Podcast. Anthony is a repeat entrepreneur who has previously founded and sold two companies, EnvoyNow and KnowYourVC. He has also held leadership positions at Blockfolio and is a board member at RateMyInvestor. Shownotes: Anthony tells us how he became an entrepreneur Anthony talks about how his past injury affected his entrepreneurial spirit Why invest in fine wine now? How does Anthony’s team identify investment-grade wine? Is Vinovest open to non-accredited investors? The Vinovest warehouses How to manage your wine investments through Vinovest What about investing in whiskey? vinovest.co

The alternative investing podcast ecosystem is full of doom and gloom. It’s always that way. Any time we get out of a recession and the economy gets a little hot, everyone’s calling for the zombie apocalypse. They tell you to prepare for the worst because the zombies are coming. Start growing your own food and buy lots of precious metals. Because, of course, silver coins are the currency of choice for zombies. Eventually, the natural cycles do their thing and the economy does go south. That’s when the doom and gloomers do their end-zone dance and tell you that they had predicted the down-turn the whole time. They are right. After all, even a broken clock is right twice a day. Now let me be clear. I understand that we live in unprecedented times of sovereign debt, record low interest rates, and the Federal Reserve is printing money at unparalleled levels. Oh yeah—and we have a hell of a demographic cliff coming up next decade. But… if you listened to the doom and gloom crowd for the last 6 years, you missed out on a lot of opportunities to make money. Case in point: our investor club partner Western Wealth Capital has been around for about 6-7 years. Over the last 6 years, one investor turned $750K of invested capital into over $4 million! Now compare that to how far gold has come since 2015. Yeah…no thanks. The reality is that the economy is dynamic and you have to make money when you can. If you’re worried about a depression happening 10 years from now and stop making good investments today, you probably will not fare as well as someone who is actively growing their wealth right now. Building wealth creates resilience. Fear does not. But listen…if you listen to a lot of podcasts, I don’t blame you for stashing gold under your bed. There’s a lot of opportunistic financial forecasters out there telling you that the world is coming to an end…again. You know what I would love to see? I would love to see all economists, especially those who shill gold, provide a scorecard on their financial forecasts. My guess is that in most cases, those who predicted the last two recessions, would also be the ones who predicted 5 more recessions that didn’t happen in between. If you’re good at predicting the future, show us your track record, right? Well, as it turns out, there is one group of economists who have been keeping score since the mid 1940’s and have predicted economic events with 97 percent accuracy since that time. Not surprisingly, they predict both good times and bad. That’s the way the real world works! The firm is called ITR economics and I listen closely to everything they have to say. Maybe you should too. You can get started by listening to this week’s Wealth Formula Podcast where I interview ITR economist, Taylor St. Germain. Learn about the pandemic economy and what’s on the horizon over the next decade. Don’t miss this show! As an economic analyst, Taylor St. Germain provides consulting services for small businesses, trade associations, and Fortune 500 companies across a spectrum of industries. His dynamic personality and extensive knowledge of economic trends and their business relevance are highly valued by clients and colleagues alike. Taylor is a member of ITR’s Dallas team and specializes in forecasting at both the market and company levels. With his depth of experience, Taylor is a key contributor to ITR Economics’ forecast accuracy rating of 94.7%. Shownotes: Why did the market continue to do so well when profits don’t support the valuations? How is a depression different from a recession? What makes the ITR approach to economics unique? http://itreconomics.com/

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” -Mike Tyson Life is full of surprises…both good and bad. The last 12 months were, to say the least, unexpected. Everyone has a different story. Hundreds of thousands of people died from Covid-19 and left even more people behind to mourn their loss. Businesses closed, people lost jobs and some experienced poverty for the first time. Marriages came to abrupt ends and kids couldn’t go to school. But the funny thing is that, for those of us who survived, we seem to be doing ok. Human beings are incredibly resilient. And, as it turns out, can adapt to pretty much anything over time. I often talk about a certain kind of “wealth thermostat” that keeps people in a certain range of wealth. If you are a $100K person you will somehow find a way to make $100K per year but you won’t make a million. If you are a $1 million per year person, you will find a way to make that amount etc. Unless you figure out how to reset your financial thermostat, you are kind of stuck where you are. As it turns out, there is also a “happiness thermostat”. Most people think that more money will make them happier. But studies recently done suggest that’s only true until you hit about $75K per year. If you can afford food and a roof over your head, you’ve covered the essentials to get to your baseline happiness. Lottery winners, as it turns out, aren’t any happier than most people. The initial thrill of making a lot of money and being able to buy stuff seems to get old pretty quickly. In fact, studies show that they tend to rate the pleasure of mundane events of everyday life lower than others. On the other hand, people who get paralyzed in accidents don’t seem to be any less happy than the general population after an initial period of mourning.  The moral of the story is that we tend to get accustomed to pretty much anything in life that punches us in the face or gets handed to us on a silver platter. Happiness, it seems, exists outside of objective life circumstances. No matter what happens, we tend to drift back to where our happiness thermostats are set. How do we turn up the temperature on happiness in our lives? I wish I could answer that. In fact, a lot of people are trying to answer that question. The topic has spawned an entirely unique body of research which is called positive psychology. Joel Wade is an expert in positive psychology and he is my guest on Wealth Formula Podcast this week! Don’t miss this interview. Listen NOW. Joel F. Wade, Ph.D. is Marriage and Family Therapist and Life Coach, and the author of The Virtue of Happiness, Mastering Happiness, The San People of the Kalahari, and an in-depth online course: A Master’s Course in Happiness, drawing from the increasingly useful research in psychology in general, and positive psychology in particular; and his nearly four decades of working with people professionally. He has written regularly for a variety of publications, including The New Individualist and The Good Men Project; and the Beyond Wealth columns for the Oxford Club. He’s also a world class athlete, having won multiple national and world championships in water polo. Dr. Wade enjoys teaching clear, practical skills and ideas that can be used immediately, inspiring his readers and listeners to take effective steps toward a more rewarding, joyful, and resilient life. As a Life Coach he works with people around the world via phone and Skype, and can be found at drjoelwade.com. Shownotes: How has the pandemic affected the socialization and psychological development of children? How people are going to adjust to normal life again after Covid? ome things that can provide temporary boosts in mood How does Positive Psychology work?

Value is a social construct. Things have value because we, as a society, agree that they are valuable.  That is the only reason that gold has the value that it does. Yes, it has unique metallic qualities and it is scarce, but there is no intrinsic quality that gives it the value it has in society. We have collectively assigned that value to it. And to be clear, this is not intended to be a knock on gold or gold bugs. I am well aware of the value gold has kept since ancient civilization dating back from the Egyptians to the Inca. Longevity certainly matters. I am simply stating what I consider to be an obvious fact—monetary value is not intrinsic to any commodity. Yet, the perception of value in society serves an important function for accounting purposes. But why must we concede value only to ancient stuff? In a technological society like we have today, does it make sense to look only to the past for inefficient stores of value? I don’t think so. That’s one of the reasons why I believe that bitcoin will ultimately serve a similar role in society as gold. Bitcoin is finite, deflationary and you can’t confiscate it. You can cross borders with billions of dollars by simply memorizing a series of numbers and letters.  Robert Kiyosaki calls gold “God’s money” and bitcoin “The people’s money”. That metaphor is golden! I began talking about bitcoin on Wealth Formula Podcast three years ago. Many of you got it then and took action. Some of you even made millions of dollars because of that introduction to cryptocurrency. To you I say…you’re welcome! For those of you who still don’t understand the significance of bitcoin, it’s time to wake up. Bitcoin is here to stay and it will become increasingly mainstream over the next few years. Even if you don’t have the appetite to buy bitcoin now you owe it to yourself to try and understand this phenomenon. This week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast is critical for you to understand the future of money. My guest, Samson Mow, is recognized as one of the most influential bitcoin visionaries in the world and there is no one better to explain the past, present and future of this asset. Listen NOW! Samson Mow is Blockstream’s CSO and Pixelmatic’s CEO. Blockstream is the leading provider of blockchain technologies, on the forefront of work in cryptography and distributed systems. Samson founded Pixelmatic in 2011 to creating engaging games that are truly social and encourage new connections to be made. Previously at BTCC, one of the largest bitcoin exchanges and mining pools in the world, Samson’s role as COO was to oversee the day-to-day operations of the company and directly manage the exchange and mining pool business units. Previously, Samson was a director of production and executive producer at Ubisoft, where he spearheaded expansion into Asian markets for web, social, and mobile games. Samson oversaw ongoing development and live operations of the cross-platform (web and iOS) MMO strategy game “Might & Magic: Heroes Kingdoms” in Asia, along with the social games “Castle & Co” (Facebook, mixi, Naver) and “The Smurfs & Co” (Facebook, mixi). “The Smurfs & Co” is Ubisoft’s most successful social game to date, reaching over 10 million users through organic growth. Prior to Ubisoft, Samson was in charge of business development and operations at Sitemasher, a Vancouver based startup developing a SaaS platform for building websites and apps. Sitemasher was the winner of the 2008 Blue Sky Innovation Excellence Award from Microsoft and was later acquired by Salesforce.com for US$20 million and rebranded as Site.com. Samson holds a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Simon Fraser University in Canada. As a veteran of the game industry, Samson regularly features as a speaker and panelist in conferences such as GDC and CGDC. Shownotes: How Samson got into bitcoin What is bitcoin? Is bitcoin a store of value or is it a currency? The biggest challenge for bitcoin

I am not an economist but I do recognize the importance of understanding a little bit of macroeconomics to guide me as an investor. After all, financial markets don’t move in a vacuum. They are affected by all sorts of things including monetary and fiscal policy. As a reminder, monetary policy is dictated by the Federal Reserve. Essentially, they have two powers that they can wield to impact the financial system. One is the power to set interest rates at which the banks trade with one another—the so-called “Fed Funds Rate.” The other is the ability to print money and buy bonds—aka quantitative easing. Right now this monetary policy is as loose as it can be. With historically low interest rates and quantitative easing cranking away, the Fed is doing what it can to steer us out into a post-pandemic economy. While the Fed does its thing, the US Government and Treasury are responsible for fiscal policy—aka government spending. Obviously, that is also hard at work right now as demonstrated by the recent $1.9 trillion stimulus package. Simultaneously, household savings rates are high and there is enormous pent-up demand for spending that will presumably be unleashed late this summer and into the rest of the year as Covid-19 herd immunity becomes reality through vaccination efforts. All of the ingredients are there for an economic boom like we haven’t seen in decades. The economy could really heat up and we could see some inflation.  Historically the response of the Federal Reserve to a hot economy is to put on the brakes so that inflation does not get out of control. Raising interest rates and not printing money would be the steps that you might expect. But this time, it may be different. The Fed has changed its policy. In the past, the Fed has used a target inflation rate of 2 percent as a major indicator of when it needs to raise rates. But now the policy is to allow rates to overshoot 2 percent and to focus more on the average rate of inflation. In other words, if the economy heats up, they will let it boil! Low interest rates are critical to keep asset prices inflated. One of the misconceptions that people have is that the Fed Funds rate is the primary indicator for long-term loans like mortgages. That’s actually not the case.  Long-term mortgages are more correlated with the bond market—specifically the 10 year treasury. The bond market is complicated and I won’t pretend to completely understand it myself. However, for simplicity just know that as the 10 year treasury rises, so will interest rates for your asset-based loans. Assets will sell off if the 10 year treasury spikes and that’s what happened recently. That’s why there was a huge sell-off in Tesla stock presumably. The 10 year treasury will naturally go up if the markets expect inflation. So if that’s the case and the Fed wants to keep rates under control, what can it do? Well, remember quantitative easing is where the Fed creates money out of nothing. When it prints that money, it buys bonds like the 10 year treasury. If the Fed continues to buy treasuries, it can control the supply and demand and artificially suppress the yield on those bonds. That’s what it’s doing and what it plans on doing more of in the near future. So, the take-away I have from this news is that inflation is coming so don’t sit on cash. That’s a sure fire way of losing money as it loses value over time. I also interpret this as “go time”. The economy is about to boom and I, for one, will position myself in the assets that will benefit from this explosion. Finally, expect this boom to last. The Fed and the Treasury are going to let the fireworks go on for a little bit longer than they normally do. That’s it for my macroeconomic warm-up for the week. Now you are ready to listen to an economist talk about these issues and a lot more in this week’s Wealth Formula Podcast. Listen NOW! P.S. My 11 year old daughter just released a song called “Worst Year Ever” that is available on all the streaming services such as Spotify and Itunes. She used the name Camilla Sabine (her middle name) in case you want to search for it. You can also check it out on Youtube at the following link: https://youtu.be/wUH_AN5kLGM  I bet your kids will love it! Richard Duncan is the author of three books on the global economic crisis. The Dollar Crisis: Causes, Consequences, Cures (John Wiley & Sons, 2003, updated 2005), predicted the global economic disaster that began in 2008 with extraordinary accuracy. It was an international bestseller. His second book was The Corruption of Capitalism: A strategy to rebalance the global economy and restore sustainable growth. It was published by CLSA Books in December 2009. His latest book is The New Depression: The Breakdown Of The Paper Money Economy (John Wiley & Sons, 2012). Since beginning his career as an equities analyst in Hong Kong in 1986, Richard has served as global head of investment strategy at ABN AMRO Asset Management in London, worked as a financial sector specialist for the World Bank in Washington D.C., and headed equity research departments for James Capel Securities and Salomon Brothers in Bangkok. He also worked as a consultant for the IMF in Thailand during the Asia Crisis. Richard has appeared frequently on CNBC, CNN, BBC and Bloomberg Television, as well as on BBC World Service Radio. He has published articles in The Financial Times, The Far East Economic Review, FinanceAsia and CFO Asia. He is also a well-known speaker whose audiences have included The World Economic Forum’s East Asia Economic Summit in Singapore, The EuroFinance Conference in Copenhagen, The Chief Financial Officers’ Roundtable in Shanghai, and The World Knowledge Forum in Seoul. Richard studied literature and economics at Vanderbilt University (1983) and international finance at Babson College (1986); and, between the two, spent a year travelling around the world as a backpacker. Shownotes: Is the worst of the economic fallout from this pandemic behind us? Why would a spike in yields in the bond market cause a sell-off in the stock market? The concept of bank reserves as it relates to liquidity. Richard talks about Macro Watch

Life is not long enough to take advantage of the wisdom that comes with age. It’s really kind of a cruel joke of nature if you think about it. You get smarter as the rest of your body becomes less functional and closer to death. This phenomenon really needs to be experienced in order to be believed. I recall listening to a young syndicator recently telling me that experience is over-rated. That’s easy to think when you are, indeed, young and inexperienced. Experience does matter because, although history may not repeat itself, it most certainly rhymes. When you’ve been through a cycle or two you do have a little bit more insight compared to one who has not. Luckily for me, I’m not that old yet. However, I am in my late 40s and I am seeing patterns in the economy and investing that my younger peers are not. In fact, seeing these patterns come to fruition has made me realize how important it is to learn more history in order to compensate for the things that I have not yet seen. This unique type of intelligence we gain over time is what is called wisdom. Again, It’s really hard to appreciate when you are young. I still remember my father telling me things when I was a teenager that I blew off as nonsense that I realized later in life were profoundly true. These days, when someone has been around longer than me and has wisdom to share, I listen. Wisdom is priceless and I, for one, cannot get enough of it. My friend Russell Gray doesn’t look that old but boy does he have a lot of history to share and I always learn something from him. Hopefully you will too on this week’s episode of Wealth Formula Podcast as I get a chance to reflect on the events of 2020 with Russ and contemplate on what happens next! Russell Gray is Robert’s sidekick on The Real Estate Guys™ Radio and TV Shows. Russ is a financial strategist with a background in financial services dating back to 1986. As a faculty member for the California Association of Realtors, Russ taught Real Estate Finance to Realtors® pursuing the prestigious GRI designation. He is a popular speaker and author. Shownotes: Russ talks about some of the things that surprised him over the past year. What is Stagflation? The best thing to do is to invest in hard assets as much as possible. Russ talks about how real estate is a hedge against inflation.